![]() ![]() Color marks you, but your membership in black society also gives you an indestructible house to live in and a bed to rest on. Being black may still not be the most advantageous thing in the world, but being nothing or being neutral-the rallying cry of modern-day multiculturalists-has never made any emotional or real-world sense. And it gives the lightest-skinned among us the assurance of identity that everybody needs to feel grounded and psychologically whole-even whites, whose public non-ethnicity is really ethnicity writ so large and influential it needs no name. It’s a foundation that allows us to talk abstractly about a ” black community” as concretely as we talk about a black community in Harlem or Chicago or L.A.’s South Central (a liberty that’s often abused or lazily applied in modern discussions of race). ![]() But by forcing blacks of all complexions and blood percentages into the same boat, the law ironically laid a foundation of black unity that remains in place today. Of course I deplore the motive behind the law, which was rooted not only in white paranoia about miscegenation, but in a more practical need to maintain social order by keeping privilege and property in the hands of whites. Now, I have always believed that what is now widely considered one of slavery’s worst legacies-the Southern “one-drop” rule that indicted anyone with black blood as a nigger and cleaved American society into black and white with a single stroke-was also slavery’s only upside. ![]()
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